Performance Goals in Public Management and Policy: The Nature and Implications of Goal Ambiguity

Chan Su Jung provides a thorough review of goal ambiguity in the public sector, exploring the general assertions, arguments and empirical evidence regarding performance goal ambiguity, particularly highlighting its causes, consequences, and mediation effects. The author proposes a new conceptual framework for successful analysis of goal ambiguity that can effectively relate to diverse organizational and program characteristics.Using U.S. federal programs, South Korean central government agencies, and English local authorities as examples, Jung empirically tests his framework to validate the new approach for goal ambiguity analysis. The author corroborates management capacity, third-party involvement, learning times, size, and work complexity as predictors of goal ambiguity and performance. In addition, Jung studies political insulation structures as moderators between management capacity and goal ambiguity, along with the negative effect of goal ambiguity on performance. Based on these empirical findings, the author provides clear and transferable principles to guide further theoretical and conceptual studies on the topic.An essential read for quantitative researchers and doctoral students of public management and policy, this book will guide future empirical studies on goal ambiguity and performance in the public sector.

Reviews of Performance Goals in Public Management and Policy: The Nature and Implications of Goal Ambiguity

`This book is a must read to those who are interested in public performance goals and goal ambiguity issues. The author offers not only comprehensive and superb conceptual discussions on public performance goals and goal ambiguity as independent, mediating, and dependent variables in public organizations, but also provides rigorous evidence based on empirical analyses of U.S. Federal government data as well as the data obtained from British local governments and South Korean central government. While this book itself is a refined scholarly architecture of public performance goals and goal ambiguity by carefully linking concepts, models, and empirical analyses, the author also envisions exciting future research by positing fourteen compelling research propositions and various research methods.' — M. Jae Moon, Yonsei University, South Korea